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All That Jazz: Charles Tolliver

August 12, 2008

What was left of post-bop in 1970? Caught between the Scylla of fusion and the Charybdis of the avant-garde, such incomparable modernists as Jackie McLean and Andrew Hill had gone, in just a few years, from the cutting edge to the shadows, and found themselves without a record label. On May 1 of that year, the twenty-eight-year-old trumpeter Charles Tolliver, a key sideman for both, brought his quartet, Music Inc., to Slug’s Saloon on East 3rd St., between Avenues B and C, and had the prescience to record the gig. He and the band’s pianist, Stanley Cowell, promptly founded their own record label, Strata-East, to release their own work as well as that of others from their fold. The group’s resulting recordings, now available from Mosaic Records, via Amazon, are fervent, intimate classics of live jazz; they convey the spirit of the cramped bandstand and the rapt crowd as keenly as Charles Mingus’s Debut recordings from the Cafe Bohemia, Eric Dolphy’s Five Spot dates, and John Coltrane’s sets from the Village Vanguard. Tolliver’s interplay with Cowell and the drummer Jimmy Hopps seems telepathic; he blends the vehemence of Coltrane, the modal intricacy of Miles Davis, the blues-based lyricism of Lee Morgan, and even the banshee fanfares of Albert Ayler. I wore out the grooves of their LPs, “Live at Slug’s,” volumes 1 and 2, and the followup, “Live in Tokyo.” All three are together in this box, along with an hour of outtakes.—Richard Brody